Session 110: Tuesday, April 16, 2013

During this session, Daniel Morgenthaler presented selected essays from the Sternberg publication "Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel" edited by Joshua Simon.

"Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel" is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it." (Book cover)

Participants:
7

Session 109: Tuesday, April 9, 2013

During this session, Philip Matesic briefly presented the following two essays from the book "Everything is in Everything: Jacques Rancière between Intellectual Emancipation and Aesthetic Education" edited by Jason Smith and Annette Weisser.

"Communist Education" by Jan Voelker
"The Master In His Place: Jacques Rancière And The Politics Of The Will" by Jason E. Smith

The essays collected in this book represent versions of papers presented at a 2011 symposium, held at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. The symposium considered Rancière's work in relation to aesthetics, politics, and education.

Participants:
11

Session 108: Tuesday, March 19, 2013

"Bürger erhebt euch!: Postdemokratie, Neoliberalismus und ziviler Ungehorsam" bei Markus Metz & Georg Seesslen

"Ziviler Ungehorsam" ist ein fundamentaler Bestandteil jeder Demokratie, gerade weil er reagiert auf die Brüche zwischen Rechtspraxis und Gerechtigkeit, Freiheit und Staat, Politik und Menschlichkeit, Selbstdarstellung und Korruption der politischen Klasse, Verantwortung und Macht, auf die Selbstwidersprüchlichkeit des Systems. Es ist die Form, in der sich politisches Handeln aus moralischen Gründen äussert: Der Beschluss der Bürgerinnen, auf dem Weig in eine unmenschliche Gesellschaft nicht mehr mitzugehen und stattdessen die drei grossen Werte einer menschlichen Gesellschaft wieder einzufordern: Freiheit, Gerechtigkeit, Solidarität.

"Bürger erhebt euch" begründet das Recht auf Kritik, Dissidenz, Einspruch, Widerstand und zivilen Ungehorsam in einer Gesellschaft, in der postdemokratisches Regieren und neoliberales Wirtschaften Bürger- und Menschenrechte bedroht, fragt nach Formen und Zielen des "bürgerlichen Aufstands" und formuliert die politische Kultur einer postheroischen und postdogmatischen sozialen Bewegung. Diese neue soziale Bewegung ist mit dem Occupy-Impuls noch nicht zu Ende, sie hat gerade erst angefangen!" (Klappentext).

Teilnehmer:
8

Session 107: Tuesday, March 5, 2013

By now, art is probably seen more on Facebook walls than real-life ones. Why is it that the growing importance of the digital does not have a similar impact on the contents of works of art, as it has on the way they are presented?

Claire Bishop, professor at City University of New York and well known for her critical reactions to Nicolas Bourriaud's thoughts on Relational Aesthetics, deals with this question in "Digital Divide", an essay written for the September 2012 issue of Artforum.

Why do we separate media arts and digital arts from more conventional media, even exhibiting them in specialized institutions? Will art eventually be left behind by the fast developments within the digital realm? Or can it rather be a tool to counter the predominance of the digital?

This session was proposed by Daniel Morgenthaler.

Participants:
15

Session 106: Tuesday, February 12, 2013

During this session, Bruno Latour's essay "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" provided a basis for re-thinking critique as a human-centered practice in relation to art.

Drawing the attention toward the multiplicity of processes and things generative of situations of critique, Latour proposes to move from "matters of fact" to "matters of concern" and from "Realpolitik" to "Dingpolitik." In other words, he underlines a mode of thinking inclusive of more-than-human factors relevant for critique and its undoing.

This session was proposed by Christoph Brunner.

Participants:
17

Session 105: Tuesday, February 5, 2013

For this session Stefan Wagner presented the essay "tainted love: art's ethos and capitalization" by suhail malik and andrea philips.

The text was selected from the book "contemporary art and its commercial markets - a report on current conditions and future scenarios" edited by Maria Lind (Sternberg Press 2012) and describes the evolution of funding structures and their impact on the contemporary art world.

Participants:
6

Session 104: Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Production, Capital and Language (Session II of II)

During these two sessions, Dimitrina Sevova proposed a transversal reading of three texts on the topic of relations between production, capital and language.

Together the texts formed a rhizome as a map of shared knowledge between practice and theory, rather than contrasting theses to be juxtaposed, and build on the intersection between two major discourses linked to economic theories: Marx's critique of political economy and Freud's psychoanalysis.

During this second session, we examined three texts written in different time periods, from 1975 until 2012. Félix Guattari and Franco Bifo Berardi collaborated starting in the 1970s and drew on schizoanalytic theory, while operating a paradigm shift towards an economy of desires and micro-politics or molecular revolution.

Text 1:
Félix Guattari "20: Molecular Revolutions" (Guattari's improvised address to the Schizo-Culture Conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in New York in 1975)

Text 2:
Félix Guattari "21: Desire is Power, Power is Desire" (Answers to the Schizo-Culture Conference) in id., Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2008, pp. 282-290.

Text 3:
Bifo - Franco Berardi "No. 094: transverse," in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), Documenta 13: Catalog 1/3, The Book of Books | 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts, 2012, pp. 611-617.

Participants:
8